Trace & Learn: Counting Board Book (Post 2) — Research, References, and Finding My Direction

 

What I Looked At Before Starting

Before jumping into drawing, I spent time going through the assignment material and Zoe’s video. I made notes of anything that caught my attention—sometimes small details, sometimes bigger ideas.

I also looked at the work of illustrators like:

• Ingela Peterson Arrhenius
• Ekaterina Trukhan
• Penelope Dullaghan
• Nicola Slater

At one point, I even took

Vintage Illustration for Engaging Children’s Books by Ingela Peterson Arrhenius on Domestika. That really helped shape how I was thinking about style and simplicity.

Building My Own Visual Boards

I separated each piece of text into different Google Slides and started building little idea boards for every page.

I filled them with:

• Reference photos
• Character ideas
• Actions and moods
• Anything that felt right for that piece of text

Then came a phase I really enjoyed—I just kept drawing fruits and vegetables over and over again. On rough paper, in notebooks, on random scraps… just trying to understand their shapes.

Somewhere in that repetition, I started to see characters inside those shapes.

Once a few personalities started to emerge, I held onto those traits and slowly carried them across all the other fruits and vegetables so everything felt like it belonged in the same world.

Idea boards